


Laura the Lionheart

by Ygern



Series: A DISQUISITION OF DOMESTICITY [2]
Category: Inspector Morse (TV), Lewis (TV)
Genre: Episode: s09e05-06 What Lies Tangled Parts 1-2, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-06
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-27 08:47:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16215587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ygern/pseuds/Ygern
Summary: Laura and Robbie find their holiday in New Zealand going sour. Set post Season 9's last episode but long before Part 1 of this series.





	Laura the Lionheart

**Author's Note:**

> Writing a series that went backwards in time made sense in my head, I don't know if it works so well in reality. But, well, we live and learn.
> 
> I always loved the character of Laura Hobson and I was so pleased when they brought her along from _Morse_ to the new series of _Lewis_. Ironically, Kevin Whately is on record saying that he thought she was too young to be the love-interest of Lewis. This makes me giggle quite a lot.

I still remember the moment I met Dr Laura Hobson. I think I fell a tiny bit in love with her that day. She was so young then. We both were, I suppose. She came striding up to me and Morse in all her fresh-faced earnestness in a baggy green jumper, with a proper old fashioned black leather doctor’s bag, and demanded to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Mouse. 

Morse blinked in horror at the mangling of his name, but in the space of seconds she had me smiling. In less than an hour she had put Morse in his place twice, made me laugh out loud at least once, (earning me a couple of glares from me governor), and had provided us with an initial crime-scene analysis as well as an impromptu education on the effect of a small calibre bullet striking the human body. She was impressive, but I wasn’t looking for a partner then, and neither was she. I was married. More to the point, I was happily married. 

Perhaps it’s not fair of me to say that she wasn’t looking for a partner back then. Maybe she was, but she certainly wasn’t looking for one in me. Laura, if she can be defined by anything, is the sort of woman who gives off the impression that she doesn’t need anybody. 

Certainly she wasn’t the sort of woman Morse typically went for. Morse, with a few notable exceptions, liked women to be demure, at least on the surface, with a slight air of tragedy and helplessness about them. Morse mostly made appalling choices in love and women. Laura, on the other hand was entirely self-sufficient; projecting professional confidence, wielding a mischievous sense of humour and a complete lack of need for a rescuing hero. Morse had put forward the opinion to me at the time that he suspected it was a facade necessitated by the harshness of her profession. Perhaps to a degree that was true, although not entirely for the reasons he thought. There she was in a work environment that was still very much populated by men in those days, and very often highly opinionated and self-aggrandizing men at that. It was undoubtedly sensible to ensure that those she encountered professionally knew only that she was excellent at her job and impervious to special gazes from admiring or curious male colleagues. Men found her attractive and intractable. I suppose we got on better than most because I wanted nothing from her other than a colleague I respected for her knowledge and enjoyed for her jokes.

When Val died Laura didn’t attempt any comforting words. She just put her hand on my shoulder and gave me a look of understanding. Neither of us has any truck with gods or afterlives, so no well-worn truisms, even the best-intentioned ones, could have held any emotional comfort for me and she knew this. People mean well, but there are few things more trying to an atheist than when you have to listen to people vouch for the happiness of a future reunion with loved ones, when all you know is that they are gone and all that’s left of them are what memories you carry in your head. 

When me Val was killed by a hit-and-run car in London, a part of me, what felt like the best of me, died with her — or at least wished he were dead with her. In a way my poor children lost both their parents on that horrible day. Eventually Lyn forgave me, Mark less so. But with Laura there was no empty advice; just quiet understanding and the space to let me grieve and occasionally vent my frustrations to a friendly ear that would never judge, and never make stupid suggestions about seeing a counsellor, not even when there must have been a reek of brandy on my breath every day for months from the night before.

When I was offered the attachment in the BVI she simply hugged me and wished me luck and said she hoped I would be back one day. When I did come back she treated me like an old friend until I was ready for more; she made it clear what she liked and didn’t like; there were no dramatics even when I probably deserved a good kick for missing dinner or turning up with a hasty bag of fish and chips instead of the three star restaurant she had been promised. She endured my rare but antediluvian attempts at flirting with wit.  
_Ah Doctor, you bring me this because you love me._  
Thank God that James wasn’t there to witness her rebuttal:  
_If I bring you anything, you cheeky sod, it’s because I secretly love Hathaway._  
I’d get a raised eyebrow and a mocking grin when I’d gone and mucked things up. Plain-spoken, direct and always kind. That was Laura. Being with her was easy. She understood me, she made me laugh.

I really wish I could have loved her the way she deserved. Next to my Val she is the best woman I’ve ever known.

But it didn’t work out the way I thought it might. Some twenty years after we first met, after many months of a strange mating dance between us, after I had professed my love for her and flown to the other end of the world with her; I found myself sitting on a rock by the side of a road in New Zealand watching a greenish-grey kea waddling around a parking lot with the prize of apple peelings, feeling like my world was coming to an end for a second time. Our happily ever after was turning into a mistake. Laura was angry with me. For the first time in my life I think I saw her really angry to the point where she couldn’t speak to me for several hours.

I couldn’t blame her. All those years of patiently dealing with me nonsense, especially coming up to the big trip overseas, with my last minute stupid panic about my job not being there any more when I returned. She’d stayed calm and supportive while I’d been spinning out of control. If Hathaway hadn’t talked sense into me at the last minute I’d have buggered up the whole trip before it had even started and wouldn’t have come. With the way things turned out, maybe I shouldn’t have bothered. Saved myself 24 hours crammed into a plane seat. But one way or another I suppose this would have come to pass, and I would have to deal with the fact that I had let myself down and disappointed Laura in the worst possible way. 

If I was going to be honest, the prospect of being Laura’s _inamorato_ was fairly intimidating when it started to become a real possibility. It didn’t help that her once-upon-a-time viciously envious old housemate Alec Pickman had once deliberately insinuated to me that she had a sexual appetite that was voracious and fearless and far in excess of mine; and that titbit of knowledge had stored itself permanently in my brain making me fear that I could never quite measure up to her tastes. I was an old widower whose long-distant sex life had been fulfilling if predictable, safe in the arms of a rock-steady marriage. How much of that matched up with Laura’s life of independence and freedom? For the first time in decades making love was suddenly a terrifying prospect, as if I had been remade a teenager, and not in a good way.

At least she had the kindness to never say that it happened to all men at some stage in their lives. In the evenings I eagerly resorted to uploading photos from the day’s travels and picking out a message on my laptop, one-fingered and slow, to Hathaway so as to elaborate on where they had been taken and what we had seen. I began to fear that Laura and I had mistaken familiarity and affection for romance.

Three weeks later, after a tense day of silence and awkward meals taken apart in newly separate rooms, Laura ambushed me at breakfast and said “Right, we going to have a chat and you’re going to sit there and you’re going to listen.”

There was nothing I wanted less, but I figured that I owed her that much at least.

We were sitting on a verandah outside our hotel overlooking some of the most beautiful mountain ranges in the world, not that I could bring myself to care. I had nevertheless dutifully snapped and uploaded their images and sent on the links to the other side of the world with a description and a half-hearted joke that would no doubt elicit a wince rather than a laugh from its recipient. Laura produced a packet of cigarettes and lit one. I tried to hide my surprise because I felt like I hadn’t the right to offer an opinion on her actions under the circumstances. I thought correctly. She glared at me in case I had anything to say on the matter and I held up my hands to show I was not going to utter a word on her choice of stress-coping mechanisms. I’d only ever seen her once before with a cigarette, and even then she’d never lit it. She took a long drag now, choked slightly and then flicked a non-existent piece of ash into the bushes.

“I think I’ve figured out what’s happened.”

I looked puzzled and probably guilty too.

“Oh Robbie, I know you didn’t mean for this to happen. You didn’t come all the way round the world so you could prove a relationship with your oldest friend wouldn’t work. It just turns out that whatever both of us want, it isn’t each other.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Me too,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes before she blinked them away furiously. She’s not much one for self-pity, is our Laura. She took another long drag on the cigarette, and let out a long stream of smoke that billowed over our heads before a breeze melted it away. “I still want us to be friends. Maybe not today, or even next week. But friends again, one day. Like we’ve always been.”

“Of course” I said. It’s more than I deserved.

“And when we get back, or rather – you – get back, you and Hathaway are going to sit down and talk this out.”

“Hathaway?” I echoed, utterly puzzled by the appearance of his name in this conversation.

“Oh Robbie, don’t be an idiot” she said crossly. “You’re in love with him. It’s probably why it’s taken so many years for us to even get to where we got. And it’s at least in part why I’m not what you want. Or rather, who you want. It’s because there’s someone else and there always has been.”

“Have you gone mad?” I found myself saying. “James is my colleague and my friend, but he’s not me secret boyfriend.”

“Didn’t say he was” is all she said in return. She stabbed out her cigarette, signalled for the waiter and ordered a pot of tea and then immediately lit another one. Her hand shook slightly and I felt guilty again. I’d never seen her so upset except for that one time with that brother and sister case, the ones who mistakenly thought she was their mother. They’d tried to kill her. That meant on a scale from one to ten, I rated at least on the level of murderous twins.

“Look,” she said after a short silence, “I’ve watched you two since the day you met. Whether you like to acknowledge it or not, there was always something between you.”

“Not like that,” I said.

“No, not like that,” she agreed. “But it wasn’t for nothing that Jean Innocent used to have all sorts of humorous nicknames for you two. Within weeks of starting you had your own private language, you could communicate without even talking, had each other’s back no matter what.”

“It’s what made us a damn good team,” I offered.

She acknowledged that with a raise of her eyebrows. “Yes, you were a damn good team. But you were also damn good friends. Don’t think I don’t know how much time you spent together off-duty.”

“What’s strange about spending time together off-duty?”

“Nothing at all. Strange, no. Unusual though for an inspector and his bagman to want to spend that much time off-duty together, don’t you think? Voluntarily, I mean. I know Morse would often demand your attention after-hours. But James and you? Never got sick of each other?”

“We had our disagreements”.

“Yes, I know,” Laura continued. “Whenever you two turned up all silent and poker-faced, I knew. But that was nothing compared to when one of you was away. The air of tragic stoicism would have been comedic if it wasn’t obvious that you i.e. the two people I care about, were both miserable when the other wasn’t there.”

She stubbed out her cigarette, took out another and then thought better of it and put it back.

“In case you missed it, that’s when I started calling you his Other Half.”

“That was a joke though” I offered.

“Yes, of course it was.”

She sighed, hesitated, and then took out the rejected cigarette and lit it. “I understand that none of these things means anything much by themselves. I also know that you wouldn’t even be here were it not for his pushing you. James cares enough about you that he’d do anything to see you happy. It’s not his fault that he thought that meant me.”

“He’s a good lad” I said, feeling increasingly uncomfortable by the way this conversation was going.

“That was the strange thing about when he took us to Stansted. The two of you could hardly bear to look at each other. The whole time we were in the Departures Hall there was just that one little glance between the two of you when I deliberately walked away to give you a chance to say good bye in private. You were doing your best Master of Nonchalance impression, and he looked like he was heading off to the gallows.”

I could barely breathe, let alone talk, so I took a cigarette out of her pack, lit it and took a drag and felt my head spin like a drunk on a three day bender. I last had a fag several decades ago, so it’s not surprising me body wasn’t impressed with the sudden flood of nicotine to the brain.

“There’s more than one reason why two friends won’t look at each other: they’re fighting maybe, or they’re trying not to set each other off laughing. But it wasn’t either of those things at the airport. So you’d maybe want to have a long hard think about why, when you went on holiday with your girlfriend you couldn’t look your best friend in the face to say goodbye, not even though he had gone to the trouble of driving us all the way to London.”

I had no answer for that. Hathaway was me mate, me best friend - as unusual as it may be for a retired copper to regard his ex-bagman, more than 25 years his junior, as his best mate. That’s what it was though. In a different world it might never have happened, we would be too different, there would be too many years between us. But in this world, a lonely old widower met a solitary young clever clogs and suddenly we both had a friend where before there had been nothing.

Laura was far from finished though.

“Do you know how many photos you email him a day to keep him apprised of everything that’s happened in Camp Lewis? Every day?”

I gestured with my hands in a small flail that I didn’t know, but that I had a feeling that she did, and was about to elaborate. But she didn’t go on. Laura stared at the horizon and then was distracted by the waiter returning with tea and sandwiches. I briefly thought of excusing myself, and then decided against it. Best deal with this head on, it wasn’t going to go away by itself. The image of Hathaway and me called up on the carpet in front of Innocent suddenly raised itself unbidden: both of us doing everything not to crack up at least until we were safely out of her sight. _“The point of a partnership such as yours is that the junior officer matures to the level of the senior, rather than that the senior officer should regress.”_  
I had to bite my lip to stop myself from smirking. He and I are always laughing together. I missed him like blazes.

“I knew him before you did,” Laura continued. “Oh, don’t give me that look. I mean I knew him to the extent of being able to say ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant Hathaway, here’s the report on the stomach contents of the victim.’”

“Go on,” I said.

“He didn’t fit in. He was diligent, courteous, and already aware that no-one appreciated anything he had to say on literature, history, or Greek. He was already turning in on himself, becoming silent and withdrawn. He almost reminded me of a young Morse as he must have been just before the bitterness set in.”

“Oy, that’s a bit hard.” I’m a bit protective towards me old governor; even if he could be a misery.

Laura’s head tilted and her eyes narrowed in exasperation with me.

“The point I was making was that the police force was not working out for James. Jean Innocent had taken a shine to him and was probably doing all she could to stall him from handing in his papers. In the long run though, I don’t think she could have stopped him. But then you arrived back home and she didn’t need to any more.” 

I well remember the day I met Hathaway. I was ill-humoured and cranky after a twelve hour flight, James was as aloof as you please and managed to convey with an economy of words and a lofty accent that he was unimpressed at having been sent to play chauffeur to a random DI, even if outwardly he was going to be nothing but a model of decorum and civility, sir. 

Laura had been a welcome sight that day – a familiar face, someone from before the moment my Oxford was blown to smithereens. But it had been Hathaway who had changed the trajectory of my life within hours of my return. I’d done him a kindness, a small thing diverting Innocent’s attention from a trivial slip-up. Perhaps no-one had ever offered Hathaway that sort of gesture of solidarity before. In return he’d convinced Innocent to give me my old detecting job back instead of kicking me upstairs to the more sedate and predictable environment of Training. I’ve always privately felt that he saved my life that day. It was also the day I started to notice his little smiles, so subtle that they were barely perceptible if you weren’t looking. They were the smiles of a man who didn’t expect his private joys to be noticed or remarked on by anyone. But he was prepared to try them out on me tentatively, to see if I would accept them, return them or ignore them.

“Within days of taking up with you he changed. Before, he was almost – I don’t know, Robbie – characterless? Or at least doing a good job of pretending to be characterless. DI Knox had let him know he didn’t want to hear anything out of him that wasn’t case-related.”

“I’m glad I had nothing to do with that bastard after I came back,” I said.

“Anyway,” she continued, “then you turned up and overnight, as it were, James had something to say about everything. I used to watch you two turn up on site. James would position himself just behind you while you were standing around waiting and I could see from your expression that you were being regaled with trivia that you were enjoying judging by your carefully-concealed smirks. At least you two conducted your crime-scene banter with a little more discretion than Morse did.” 

I cringed a bit at that. Morse could tread on people’s toes at times, something I’ve always tried not to do at scenes where the deceased’s family is present while SOCO are milling about. 

Much as I was interested in a third party perspective on _James, The Early Years_ ; I wasn’t sure why Laura was telling me any of this.

“So – not everyone likes a walking version of _Atlas Obscura_ on their team and I do. I already know that,” I said. Morse pretty much inured me to it. Truth is, I even enjoy it in moderate doses.

“My point is that he liked you – being with you – in the space of days he changed from completely inscrutable and mute, to standing at your shoulder casting secret smiles at you and talking quietly in your ear. And it’s only increased over the years.”

“I don’t get what you’re on about, Laura. We’re mates. It’s what friends do.”

“I know. And you know, I was always so glad for it. You needed him and he needed you, and that stayed, even after you retired. That look on your face when you came back from canoeing with him on the river – you’d been scared of retiring, but after that afternoon you knew that you were going to keep everything that mattered to you.

A lesser woman might have been a bit put out that she wasn’t the cause of her lover’s smile,” she added rather pointedly. “It was the happiest you’d been in days. Weeks even.”

I cringed again.

“And here’s a bit you don’t know. He and I were at a scene earlier that week and I asked him if he had missed you. You know what he said?”

“Nope.”

“He looked me in the eyes, gave me a little smile and said ‘Always’. He very nearly quit when you retired, didn’t he?”

I shrugged. “I think he was considering it during his hike through Spain”.

“That didn’t strike you as a non-standard response to one’s boss packing it in?”

“Not at all,” I said, “it wasn’t the first time he considered leaving because I was.” The words were barely out of my mouth before suddenly I saw her point. Her face was twisted in a thin smile.

_If you go, I go._

“Exactly,” she said.

“Go home, Robbie. Talk to James. Whatever this thing is between you, you two function best when you both know the other one is going to be there. At least tell him that much. That you will be there. The rest, well, that’s up to you. And I don’t particularly want to hear about it.”

My face was burning. I wanted to shout at her that that she was wrong, except that I knew that she wasn’t. What I felt most of all, once I got past the embarrassment of the last few weeks, was relief.

“And good luck, Robbie. I love Hathaway too, as it happens. So don’t muck this up.”

I still remember the moment I met Dr Laura Hobson. She was smart, funny and kind. The best woman I’ve ever know. She never needed me, but it turns out I needed her. Just not the way I thought.


End file.
